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Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
hachette
For Charles
sine qua non
CONTENTS
Cover
By Ursula K. Le Guin
Introductory Note for the 40th Anniversary Edition
1 A Parade in Erhenrang
2 The Place Inside the Blizzard
3 The Mad King
4 The Nineteenth Day
5 The Domestication of Hunch
6 One Way into Orgoreyn
7 The Question of Sex
8 Another Way into Orgoreyn
9 Estraven the Traitor
10 Conversations in Mishnory
11 Soliloquies in Mishnory
12 On Time and Darkness
13 Down on the Farm
14 The Escape
15 To the Ice
16 Between Drumner and Dremegole
17 An Orgota Creation Myth
18 On the Ice
19 Homecoming
20 A Fool’s Errand
The Gethenian Calendar and Clock
Coming of Age in Karhide
Some Karhidish Words, and Two Songs from the Domain of Estre
Author’s working sketch map
Sketch map of the Planet Gethen
INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO THE
40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
In 1976 I published an essay, ‘Is Gender Necessary?’ about some of the problems I had in writing this novel, the reasons why I wrote it as I did, and its reception by readers and critics. In 1988 I reconsidered what I’d said, reported some fairly radical changes in my thinking, and published the old text along with the suggested improvements, ending with a note – ‘I do very much hope that I don’t have to print re-reconsiderations in 1997, since I’m a bit tired of chastising myself.’
I got through 1997 without having to go back and chew on the old gender bones again; but here we are, twelve years after that and forty years after The Left Hand of Darkness first came out. Time to reconsider, perhaps, but not in a chastising mode. I feel more like celebrating.
* * *
If the phrase ‘gender construction’ had been invented in 1968, when I wrote the novel, I hadn’t heard it. Feminism was being reborn, but my own feminist education, which began with Virginia Woolf, was still plodding along behind the advance guard. I was always a feminist, but always a slow learner.
All the same, questions about the relative status of men and women were in the air, and they were interesting questions. What did ‘the division of labour’ really mean, and why did only some workers get wages? Why were the great human group institutions – religions, governments, armies, universities – set up and controlled by men? How much of the behaviour supposed to be a result of our gender is really a result of what our society expects of our gender? And so on. Interesting questions. I was interested. I thought about them. I thought in the form of thought my mind uses best: the story. What if I wrote a story, a thought experiment, about people who had no gender, or both genders? How would they behave? What would their society be like?
So there I was on Gethen, with Genly Ai, discovering these things.
That is more or less how I thought it happened and how I explained the process; now I know it didn’t happen quite like that.
After all, I had been on the ice age planet Gethen before, without noticing any peculiarities of Gethenian gender and sexuality. I’d written the story ‘Winter’s King’ in which the characters, all Gethenians, seem to be gender-divided just as we are. How did I get from there to the Gethen of The Left Hand of Darkness?
In trying to decide what to write for this introduction, I looked into a very old file-folder marked ‘WINTER’. There I found, along with charts of the journey across the ice and maps of Gethen, some early notes for the book. Many were factual, taken from books about Arctic and Antarctic living conditions and strategies – life in winter in Finland – cold adaptation in penguins and in the original inhabitants